Cast & Caper: Cuthbert's Castle
A downloadable game for Windows
IMPORTANT: Strongly recommended to run in the Itch App, it may be flagged by Windows Defender.
Cast & Caper: Cutherberts Castle is an oldschool wireframe dungeon crawler with some modern twists. It features MMORPG style party combat and an optional idle management minigame that runs in the background.
Fair warning: What this game lacks in graphics, it tries to make up for in mechanical depth. Please RTFM (read the fantastic manual), for an explanation on what's going on, the game will not hold your hand and teach you.
Controls:
The game is keyboard only.
- Movement: WASD & Numpad
- Menu navigation: Arrow keys, Enter to select and Escape to go back.
- The game now saves automatically when you enter a safezone, you can safely alt-f4 or click the X to close the game after this and you should be able to load back from the main menu
Additional personal restriction:
As an additional restriction, I chose to write the game in pure C with no libraries. It uses a custom WindowGDI renderer (for that true oldschool experience), that can only handle lines, primitive shapes and hand-written bitmaps. All sprites were manually written out into hex.
Having spoken to some of the older chaps in the DungeonCrawlers.org discord, I really wanted to learn more about what it might have been like to develop a game perhaps as early as ~1980.
Source code provided for your interest, without instruction or license here:
https://github.com/AnalyticalGoose/Cast-Caper
Known Issues:
- There are some graphical bugs, specifically around the application of ailments / status effects. These are purely visual and do not affect gameplay.
Asset Disclosure:
- 1-Bit Monster sprites are from Hexany's Monster Menagerie
- Font by Daniel Hepper - Here
Download
Development log
- Cast & Caper: Beginners Guide78 days ago
Comments
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I had a lot of fun with this! Minor thing, but I wish WASD also worked from combat so I didn't have to keep switching which hand was holding my drink :D. I also wished I could still craft white items when I upgraded crafting rarity (and similarly with green later) - had lots of resources, lots of slots with junk still, would have been fun to roll some items. I just about got my crafting up to the point to let me craft purple items when I beat the game, crafting very little though! I enjoyed the bit of crafting I did along the way (when I remembered to craft before upgrading rarity), and just a bit more engaging with that would have been cool. The movement and combat and such was all nice and snappy and I like the retro look, it didn't get in the way of the fun =).
Many thanks for taking the time to play! Really glad you had fun.
The crafting was a fairly late addition to stay neatly within the fusion rules. To me it only really feels needed on Masochist difficulty, as I tended to move through things a little too quickly to get value out of it. Crafting lower rarity gear would have been a really nice addition. What difficulty did you play on in the end?
You are the first person I've seen to fully engage with the crafting almost as a primary mechanic which is really interesting, it seems many of the other players almost completely neglected it.
You are not the first person to mention WASD working in the menus however, so i'll certainly look to improve one-handed gameplay for future jams ;).
Thank you for getting around to this, really appreciate your excellent feedback.
I played on the middle/normal difficulty. And, yeah, I engaged with the crafting tech tree system somewhat because I like those kinds of systems, but also because your manual said I should start early, so I did (but, then ended up upgrading the wrong thing early and rarely having spares of the resource I needed to actually craft as I said :). Maybe I would have enjoyed the hardest difficulty more if it forced me to / caused me to have time to craft =). This difficulty felt about the right length, though (maybe spent about 1.5 hours).
Ah yeah that sounds about right, It could do with a complete tuning pass to potentially make the materials a little more abundent on the middle and lower difficulties.
By starting early you were at least able to get through all the upgrades, which is great. I'm not sure how long a playthough on the hardest difficulty would be for someone playing for the first time - but it could easily be 2.5 - 3 hours I think (far too long I know). But then crafting probably gets better, at the expense of the rest of the game.
The game is cool. The visuals are consistent, it controls perfectly, plays smooth and delivers very fun fights featuring interesting resource management.
I got stuck when trying to leave the Gauntlet (the minimap still indicates this map, with the party on the top left tile, out of the layout), probably playing the jam version (Windows indicates the executable was last modified on 20/04 at 15:34).
Hi CryptRat, thanks so much for playing.
I'm so sorry, sadly yes there are a few issues, I've just logged on to upload a version that hopefully fixes those, and more importantly has saving and loading. I'm really gutted that your run was curtailed due to those bugs, I hope you had fun regardless.
I had fun!